Introduction

There is now a consensus among policy makers, scholars and law-and-order agencies – a standard story – that county lines pose a fundamental challenge to how drug markets and criminal gangs have been understood and policed in the UK (HMG, 2018; NCA, 2015, 2017, 2019). There are two principal challenges noted by the standard story.

The first suggests that county lines represent a significant shift in the organizational and economic rationale of how drug markets operate (Harding, 2020; Whittaker et al, 2020b). Changes in relations of supply and demand at local levels reflect changes in global consumer capitalism. In this sense, then, county lines embody a marked shift away from traditional localized markets and towards evolving, more globally informed post-industrial consumer-oriented models (McLean et al, 2020). The second key challenge relates to the identification and subsequent centring of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ within discussions regarding approaches to policing and prosecuting county lines networks (Moyle, 2019).

Both these challenges, the standard story suggests, undermine current practice and thinking regarding the policing of illicit drug markets. Traditional approaches to policing, predicated upon a normative understanding of deviance, criminal behaviour and the victim/perpetrator binary, for example, are no longer fit for purpose and require fundamental change. This is both a cause and a consequence of the standard story, and we readily admit that some of our prior research contributed to it (Robinson et al, 2019; McLean et al, 2020).

Our two ethnographic case studies of county lines in action do not demonstrate that the standard story is wrong per se, but rather, and consistent with studies that embrace their complexity (for example, Harding, 2020), demonstrate that county lines cannot be reduced to one narrative and one narrative only.